Southern Currents

Reading the South
New Fiction by Regional Authors, February 2001
by Hal Jacobs
for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

War Memorials. By Clint McCown. Graywolf Press. $23.95.

"Sometimes it takes a good tangle of lies to keep a relationship going," says Nolan Vann in Clint McCown's "War Memorials." He should know. He'd rather not talk to his wife about her being pregnant with her boyfriend's baby.

Nor does he want to talk about the 200-year-old oak tree that destroyed the new, completely uninsured, family room. Or about Nolan's father firing him at the insurance agency because he tried to postdate his homeowner's policy. Or about the fact that he's now working as a low-life, part-time repo man.

Even though Nolan's life is tottering on the edge of total collapse, perhaps because of it, he gives a brutally honest and morbidly funny account of himself.

Through his smarting eyes, we meet his father and assorted World War II veterans who still define themselves by a few brave moments that happened more than 50 years ago. The grandmothers for whom "Jesus was a stick to use on anybody they disapproved of." The Jesus impersonator who wheels his heavy cross from town to town. (Because Nolan is 33 years old, Jesus and mortality are no strangers in this book.) The yearly carnival that dishes up "raw material for about fifteen years' worth of nightmares."

McCown, who grew up in the South, has twice won the American Fiction Prize and chairs the creative writing program at Beloit College in Wisconsin. In "War Memorials," he poses an interesting question: why don't we honor all the casualties of small towns who never leave to fight wars? Perhaps this novel is that memorial.

FIRST LOOK: When I was four years old I thought Jesus was one of the stock boys at the A & P. It was an easy mistake to make. For one thing, he wore a plastic name tag that said Jesus, and that was the one word my Grandmother Vann had already taught me to read. He had a beard like Jesus. He even had a job like Jesus - always helping people out with the right directions so they could find the things they needed.

Swimming in Sky. By Inman Majors. Southern Methodist University Press. $19.95.

A casualty of suburbia is the unlikely hero of Inman Majors' debut novel, Swimming in Sky. Jason Sayer, 25, has chased travel and adventure in the years following college, and now returns to live in the unhappy split-level of his mother and stepfather. Gradually it dawns on him that while fleeing an empty suburban dream, he wasn't running towards anything better. And ever since partying with his bartender friends on Easter, he can't shake the feeling that a shadow is following him. Now he must deal with the possibility that he, "the smirkiest of the smirking suburbanites," has lost his nerve.

The novel's structure is as edgy, raw and slightly unraveled as Jason's disintegrating personality. Majors, a native of Knoxville who teaches at Motlow State Community College in middle Tennessee, captures a southern landscape that has one foot in the past - when college football heroes ruled the land - and another in the hardscrabble present of suburbia, divorce, drugs and alcohol.

FIRST LOOK: The shadow is still with me during the day, but not as bad. Something behind me, unshakable. I can forget about it for long stretches, especially when my mind is on something else. No one knows exactly. It's not really fodder for casual conversation and I fake a normal existence pretty well.

Here in the World. Victoria Lancelotta. Counterpoint. $23.

Baltimore row houses, seaside neighborhoods, and childhood memories provide the exotic background for the young women in Victoria Lancelotta's collection of short stories. In the first story, a young woman recalls her Catholic schoolgirl training with nuns ("That body is not yours to give"!) as she engages in a rough, passionate affair with a blind lover.

In "Festival," the long shadow of family sexual abuse looms over two sisters, now adults, as the younger undergoes a fling with her older sister's husband.
Lancelotta, who was born and raised in Baltimore, writes about women are scarred, sometimes physically, as they walk a fine line between fragility and fearlessness. Small moments are charged with explosive energy. In "Spice," after a teenage girl sees her name freshly carved and burned with a cigarette into her boyfriend's forearm, she and her family will never be the same.

From neighborhood bars to beach towns, Lancelotta's female characters balance their earthy passion with aching memories. These sensual and disturbing stories - many of which have appeared in anthologies and magazines - reveal the complexity of their female characters, while still keeping them shrouded in mystery.

FIRST LOOK: I'm good in bars. It's a talent, and don't let anyone tell you something different: the way to walk in, to sit, to sip a drink and smile slowly, to look so that when he sits down next to you, buys you another, leans into your perfume, he can't believe it, can't believe how blessed he is to be near an angel like you. Because an angel is what you are for that moment, in his eyes - he needs to be in your light. And the light in bars is forgiving.

In the Forest of Harm. By Sallie Bissell, Bantam Books, $21.95.

The only mystery in Sallie Bissell's debut novel, "In the Forest of Harm," is whether three female Atlanta lawyers will survive their weekend camping trip to the Nantahala National Forest. Their scent has attracted a schizophrenic killer who lives deep in the North Carolina woods (no, he's not a serial pipe bomber suspect). And, as if that's not bad enough, a heavily armed Buckhead preppie is stalking one of the women, Mary Crow, because she humiliated him during his brother's murder trial.

Needless to say, if the women hope to ever set foot in Lenox Square again, Mary Crow will need to remember all the survival tricks she learned from her Cherokee mother. Given that this Bissell is already busy on her second Mary Crow thriller, at least one of the lawyers stands a good chance of walking out of the woods alive.

Bissell, a Nashville native, divides her time between her hometown and Asheville, N.C.

FIRST LOOK: As the afternoon shadows grew long, a feeling of dread began to churn in Mary's stomach. She felt as if every tree or bush or fallen log might reveal something she didn't want to see -Alex raped, Alex strangled or Alex dead, gutted like a field-dressed deer. But the forest held no such surprises.

B-Four. By Sam Hodges, University of Alabama Press, $16.95.

The world of small-town journalism and Civil War reenacting is treated with humorous affection in this paperback reissue. In Birmingham, cub reporter Beauregard Forrest aspires to bigger things than writing pet-of-the-week columns for Page B4. He gets his big break when he uncovers a plan by Birmingham boosters to score a major public relations coup by exploiting Atlanta's traffic problems. Maybe that explains the daily tie-ups on I-285. Hodges, a native Georgian, now lives in Washington, where he is a correspondent for the Mobile Register.

FIRST LOOK: The early morning IHOP staff did not seem even idly curious about the two Confederate soldiers in nonsmoking. Beauregard knew from talking to them that they had high standards for the unusual. As employees for an all-night restaurant with a liberal coffee refill policy, they routinely served professional wrestlers, female impersonators, contestants on break from the tractor pull. Confederate soldiers floated well within this odd mainstream.

Dead of Winter. By P.J. Parrish. Pinnacle Books. $6.99.

Louis Kincaid can't shake the cold in the little Michigan resort town of Loon Lake. He's the new guy on the local police force, the only black cop in a town where the other blacks either work at the lodge or the bait shop. But he's more than happy to put some distance between himself and his last job in Mississippi.
Within days of taking the job, however, the cracks in this winter wonderland appear. There's a cop killer on the loose - and his first victim was the black policeman whom Kincaid replaced.

P.J. Parrish is the pen name of two sisters, Kristy and Kelly Montee, whose first Louis Kincaid thriller, "Dark of the Moon," was published in 1999. Kristy Montee lives in Florida and Kelly Montee lives in Mississippi.

FIRST LOOK: As he pulled back onto the highway, Louis shook his head and smiled. It was obvious the old man had been trying his damnedest to figure out what business a young black man in a beat-up convertible had in Loon Lake. Phillip had warned him it would be like that. I just don't think you'll like it there, Louis. It's a resort town, where rich white men from Chicago build hunting lodges so they have a place to get away.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sunday, Feb. 25, 2001